Discover motion pictures, past and present, at the Detroit Film Theatre

Kino Lorber, Inc.
French actor Daniel Auteuil starred in and directed “The Well-Digger’s Daughter,” which will be shown Oct. 12-21 at the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Detroit Film Theatre. The film is a remake of one by Marcel Pagnol, who directed Auteuil in “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Springs.”

The Detroit Film Theatre — the Detroit Institute of Arts’ ongoing film festival of the new and unusual, the classic and the neglected, the fictional and the documentary — has returned for its fall 2012 run.

This season features several special programs within the overall schedule.

“Twilight of the Tsars” takes a look at pre-Russian Revolution cinema in conjunction with the museum’s upcoming “Faberge: The Rise and Fall” exhibition (Oct. 14-Jan. 21).

The Alloy Orchestra returns with a four-program run of live scores to silent films, including audience favorite “Metropolis,” Oct. 6.

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Also returning is the DFT 101 series, with three essential, ground-breaking films from the 1960s.

There are also a couple of high-definition films of live stage productions of William Shakespeare from the internationally acclaimed Stratford Festival, and several collections of hard-to-see short films.

The Detroit Film Theatre is located in the auditorium behind the Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Ave. in Detroit. Tickets are $7.50, $6.50 for students with ID or DIA members; admission to DFT 101 films is $5, free for DIA members. For more information, visit www.dia.org/dft or call, 313-833-4005.

DFT 101: Claude Berri’s 1967 “The Two of Us,” about a Jewish boy hiding his ethnicity in the French countryside during World War II, 4 p.m. Sept. 22. Also, the short film “The Chicken,” which won an Academy Award.

“Elena,” a modern, Russian-style film noir in which a woman plots against her husband, 7 p.m. Sept. 28-29, 2 p.m. Sept. 30.

“This Is Not A Film,” a documentary about imprisoned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi, receives a special Wednesday night screening, 7 p.m. Oct. 3.

Twilight of the Tsars: “Pushkin and Chardynin,” featuring “The Queen of Spades” (1910), and The House in Kolomna” (1913), both based on stories by Alexander Pushkin and directed by Petr Chardynin, 7 p.m. Oct. 11

“In Celebration of WIFF,” American and Canadian short film entries from the Windsor International Film Festival, 7 p.m. Nov. 7.

Twilight of the Tsars: Two films by director Iakov Protazanov — “The Departure of a Great Old Man” (1912), in part a documentary about Leo Tolstoy, and another version of Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades (1916) — 7 p.m. Nov. 8.

“Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present,” documents another artists, whose medium is her body, as she prepares for a retrospective of her performance art at the Museum of Modern Art in new York, 7 p.m. Nov. 9, 6 p.m. Nov. 11.

Twilight of the Tsars: “High Society,” featuring another Evgeni Bauer film, “A Life For a Life” (1916), a newsreel about the death of the film’s star Vera Kholodnaia, and the comic short film “Antonia Ruined by a Corset” (1916), 7 p.m. Nov. 15.

Twilight of the Tsars: “The End Of An Era,” featuring Evgeni Bauer’s 1917 features “The Revolutionary” and “For Luck,” as well as “Behind the Screen,” a surviving fragment of the longer film “A Life Destroyed by Pitiless Fate,” 7 p.m. Nov. 29.